In 1980, people laughed when they heard Audi was developing a four-wheel-drive rally car. Hadn’t Ford tried that with their Capri 10 years earlier and drawn a blank? But the detractors stopped laughing when an Audi Quattro won the 1981 Janner Rally in Austria by 20 minutes. And they were positively “po-faced” when Hannu Mikkola started taking a full minute per stage off everyone else on the ice and snow of the year’s Monte Carlo Rally over no fewer than the first 10 stages, before a banal driver error put the car out.
World champion Stig Blomqvist, who would later win his title in a Quattro, said of the Audi’s astounding performance on the ’81 Monte, “I was making ice notes for Bjorn Waldegard at the time and we were listening to the radio announcing Mikkola’s times on the stages. I just couldn’t believe what they were saying: a minute on every stage. That was the start of the whole supercar era.”
Next, the Quattro competed in the Rally of Sweden in which Hannu and the four-wheel-drive Audi won all 25 snowy stages on only the Quattro’s second world championship event. Cars like the Ford Escort RS, Fiat Abarth 131, Renault 5 Turbo and Porsche 911SC were suddenly made obsolete. A genuine revolution was in the making.
Heads were scratched and quiet conversations took place in dark corners of world championship rally competitors’ offices. Maybe there was something in this four-wheel-drive business after all, they thought. And, of course, there was. So much so that world rally championships have now been won by nothing but four-wheel-drive cars for more than two decades. The Audi Quattro was the first and, in 1981, was in its infancy. The best was yet to come.
As a company, Audi has had a rather checkered history. In 1932, it became part of an alliance between four German car manufacturers—Horsch, Audi, Wanderer and DKW—who called themselves Auto Union. The business was bought by Daimler-Benz in 1958 and sold to Volkswagen, to which it still belongs, in 1964. VW changed its name from Auto Union to Audi.
Horsch had been no stranger to motorsport success in the early ’20s and Auto Union certainly made a place for itself in motor racing history. Between 1934 and 1939, its pioneering, rear-engined Silver Arrows won no fewer than 23 Grands Prix with the likes of Bernd Rosemeyer, Hans Stuck, Achille Varzi and Tazio Nuvolari.
After the Second World War, the Union’s DKW even won the 1954 European Rally Championship: Their driver was the bespectacled Walter Schluter, who usually competed in a cloth cap with a cigarette jammed between the first two fingers of his left hand.
Almost a quarter of a century later, the company’s image had become rather stodgy, so the Audi board accepted a proposal from its chassis engineer Jorg Bensinger to develop four-wheel-drive technology. It was first used to put down the power of the Volkswagen Iltis, an angular off-roader, to enable Freddy Kuttulinsky to win the car segment of the 1980 Paris–Dakar Rally. That four-wheel-drive technology eventually found its way to a handsome new machine called the Audi Quattro Coupe, a remarkably sure-footed road car the motorsport version of which was to sweep all before it in world championship rallying in the years to come.
What is so good about four-wheel-drive in rallying? The short answer is far better traction and braking. Rally cars were putting out 300 hp through two wheels by 1980 and that was about as much as their tires could handle. Their transmissions were getting heavier, too. Among the greatest assets of a four-wheel-drive system are its ability to share power between the wheels at all four corners of the car, of course, and the light transmission units it uses: They needed to be no heavier or more strongly made than those of two-wheel-drive production cars.
The most obvious advantage of four-wheel-drive on world championship rally special stages is improved performance on slippery surfaces, a priceless plus point because much of the series is run on unmade tracks rather than stable asphalt. Better traction—helped along by the car’s suspension and tires—means quicker stage times. The second virtue of four-wheel-drive was that, having broken the 300-hp barrier, rally cars of the ’80s would need 400 hp to be competitive. Yet their tires had never coped with more than 200 hp going through the front axle or 300 hp through the rear, so the black doughnuts were becoming a limiting factor in a car’s performance: Four-wheel drive eased the burden. Third, having twice the number of driven wheels and, therefore, driven-wheel tire area in contact with the ground, four-wheel-drive cars could be built with narrower wheels, which could be smaller and lighter than those of their two-wheel-drive opponents.
The Audi Quattro rally car project actually got under way in early 1977, a courageous move because that was a good two years before the FIA even agreed to allow four-wheel-drive cars to compete for the world rally championship. The company’s head of development engineering, Walter Treser, started by turning an Audi 80 into a four-wheel-drive rally car. And he was so successful that, when Finnish star Hannu Mikkola secretly tested the newly anointed Audi 80 Quattro in 1980, the driver said, “When you go rallying with this car, I will drive it.” And that was after sampling the interim 80, rather than the full-blown Quattro coupe, for just 30 minutes.
That 80 Quattro was a useful trampoline from which to spring to the development of the bigger Quattro Coupe. Work progressed quickly, as it had to, because Audi was determined to have the car cut its teeth on the 1981 world rally championship, which was to begin in a few months’ time.
The new car’s engine was to be the five-cylinder, 2144-cc turbo-charged unit, which produced extra power without a corresponding increase in weight. Turbos generously complemented four-wheel drive, so there would be no danger of either end of the coupe breaking away, and wheel spin would be greatly reduced. Power came on more smoothly, so massive strengthening of the transmission demanded by two-wheel-drive cars with carburetor engines would simply not be necessary. The Audi Quattro unit used air intercoolers and electronic ignition, which offered more freedom in obtaining the right settings for all conditions.
Stig Blomqvist said he first rode in a Quattro Coupe in the snow at Audi’s headquarters at Ingolstadt, Germany, in 1981, driven by Freddy Kottulinsky. Stig said that, far from snow, it was like riding on dry asphalt.
Audi’s drivers, who, of course, came from two-wheel-drive experience, had to develop new techniques with which to campaign the mould-breaking Audi Quattro. For instance, the better traction of the four-wheel-drive system compromised cornering capability and driver control as the wheels were being asked to do more. Four-wheel drive brought changes in the traditional concept of dynamic balance, on top of which setting up the car was more exacting, especially because the workings of three differentials had to be adjusted, unlike the two-wheel-drive car’s single differential.
Initially, left-foot braking continued to be used on the Audi Quattro to maintain turbo-boost pressure, but later it was still a favored technique in setting up the car for a corner so that the coupe started to slide and kill understeer. Contrary to earlier expectations, it turned out that the Audi Quattros actually cornered faster than their two-wheel-drive predecessors: that made it easier for rally drivers to concentrate harder and make more use of the Quattro’s better traction and braking. Drivers learned never to use all the Quattro’s power all the time: If they did they would not be able to control the car in unexpected situations. If the boost went up to 1.5 bar, 1.2 would be the maximum used.
Blomqvist said that in those days the Quattro handled more like a front-wheel-drive car, so after competing with Saabs in an earlier life, it was easy for him to convert to the Audi. Not so for drivers used to rear traction: They insisted the 4WD cars should handle like the ones they were used to and that began the whole technique of torque splitting in rallying.
Audi met its deadline and by January 1, 1981, FISA had homologated the Quattro Coupe, the world rally championship’s first four-wheel-drive car. The specification shows it was indeed powered by the five-cylinder, in-line, 2144-cc front, engine with a KKK turbocharger and Pierburg electronic injection, had two valves per cylinder and a single overhead camshaft. It also had permanent four-wheel-drive, of course, a dry sump, McPherson struts all around, rack and pinion steering, was 4,404 mm (173.4”) long, 1,733 mm (68.2”) wide, 1,344 mm (52.9”) high, had a wheelbase of 2,524 mm (99.4”), a track of 1,502 mm (59.1”) and weighed 1,190 kg (2,623.5 lbs.).
As the car began to assert itself, the detractors began to see that four-wheel drive was becoming one of the most important revolutions that had ever taken place in world championship rallying. And the development of rally and road cars began to move in unison for a while, rather than their motorsport clones being so obviously devoid of any relationship with the vehicles sold to the public. Yet rallying has never really been credited with bringing four-wheel drive to road cars.
Maybe that is because the reason why the sport introduced four-wheel-drive had nothing to do with the needs of production cars. It had more to do with the exciting, yet often grotesque, conditions in which rally drivers have to propel their cars at seemingly superhuman speeds: ice, snow, mud, torrential rain, fog—all to be taken at speeds even a madman would hardly contemplate. Just incredibly skillful rally drivers.
Stig Blomqvist said that when he joined Audi in 1982 he believed the Quattro was the best rally car in the world. He could drive it beyond the limit and even start hitting things without causing major problems!
Hannu Mikkola was joined at Audi by an attractive French girl named Michele Mouton, perhaps not everyone’s choice as a potential world championship rally winner, but a gifted one as it turned out. Michele gave an inkling of what she could do on the 1981 Rally of Portugal by taking 4th, an event from which team leader Mikkola retired his Quattro with engine problems.
But at the Sanremo Rally, Mouton astonished everyone by becoming the first woman to win a world championship rally. Her performance was amazing: She led the rally for 34 stages in her Quattro, although brake and driveshaft problems chopped her lead from 3 minutes to 34 seconds toward the end. The shrunken time gap between Michel and 2nd-placed Ari Vatanen in a two-wheel-drive Ford Escort RS encouraged the Finn to make one last charge in an effort to beat the French girl, but all he succeeded in doing was break his suspension and puncture his tires. So Michele Mouton and her ground-breaking works Audi Quattro Coupe marched right into the history books by winning the 1981 Rally of Sanremo: and she did so by a handsome margin of 3 m 25 s from Henri Toivonen and his Talbot Sunbeam Lotus in 2nd.
Hannu Mikkola and his Quattro gave the opposition something to think about by winning the last event of the season, a wintry, 1981 RAC Rally of Great Britain, which alternated from wet, to snow, to ice, to mud and a mixture of all four, conditions made for the four-wheel-drive Audi. The Finn completely dominated the rally, even though he did lose some time by putting his Audi Quattro on its roof in the gooey Grizedale Forest and then used his four-wheel drive to tremendous effect to retake the lead. In the end, Hannu led the rally over 25 of its 65 stages and won by an incredible 11 m 5 s from newly anointed world champion Ari Vatanen and his Escort RS.
In many ways, 1981 was an outstanding year for the novice Audi Quattros, with the team coming 5th in the world constructors’ championship, Mikkola 3rd in the drivers’ title chase and Mouton 8th. But there was better to come.
The 1982 season was an awkward one, for it was run under new FISA Appendix J regulations, which laid down the car’s engine size, minimum weight and made it extremely difficult to change a homologated car once the season had started. Apart from Audi, there were still no other four-wheel-drive cars after the title, although plans were being hatched to put that situation right by manufacturers including Peugeot and Opel, the latter working with British four-wheel-drive specialist Ferguson.
In one way, 1982 was Michele Mouton’s year: She won the Portuguese, Acropolis and Brazilian world championship rallies in her works Audi Quattro, with the Swedish and San Remo falling to Stig Blomqvist and the RAC to Hannu Mikkola again. Such performances helped make Audi the 1982 world champion manufacturer for the first time—less than two years after their radical car’s debut.
By 1983, more than one of Audi’s opponents had come around to their way of thinking and were quietly developing their own four-wheel-drive cars. Hypocrisy? No. Expediency.
If there was a glitch in the Audi philosophy, then it was the Quattro’s performance on asphalt—or lack of it. Most of the world championship was run over loose-surfaced, unpaved special stages, but there were still tarmac events and stages offering perfectly good points toward the titles, and the Quattros were not often in with a chance of winning them. So back at the company’s headquarters in Ingolstadt, Germany, work was under way to develop a lightweight version of the car called the Sport Quattro, which was expected to work better on the tarmac. It was to be ready for the 1983 Corsican Grand Prix, as the all-asphalt Tour de Corse is also known.
Photo: Audi
The new season also saw the birth of another Audi Quattro: It was a four-wheel drive, of course, but with a 2,145-cc, K-Jetronic fuel-injected engine instead of its big brother’s turbo. The new Audi 80 Quattro was capable of producing 194 hp, 164 hp less than the fully-fledged Quattro, and was expected to become a rally car for national teams and privateers. So more than a few eyebrows were raised when Stig Blomqvist nearly won the Swedish Rally with the car, ending up just 47 seconds behind one of the big Quattros driven by winner Hannu Mikkola.
The 1983 manufacturers’ title slipped through Audi’s fingers, although the team took the first four places in Argentina and scored 1-2s in Sweden, Portugal and Britain’s RAC. But Hannu Mikkola’s consistently brilliant performance did win him the year’s world drivers’ championship. So, four-wheel-drive was still very much the flavor of the year.
It would take several months for the new lightweight Audi to become competitive, so the “old” Quattro was still the company’s prime mover for 1984 and it did them proud. As expected, some of the other teams fielded their new four-wheel-drive cars, including Citroën and Peugeot, while the Subarus had a part-time system, but they were new, had their own teething troubles and, at least to begin with, were no threat to the Audis.
In fact, the old Quattro won the 1984 rallies of Monte Carlo (Rohrl), Sweden, Acropolis, New Zealand, Argentina (Blomqvist) and Portugal (Mikkola), which made Audi the 1984 world champion manufacturer again by the time the 1,000 Lakes came around in August. That rally itself was won by another four-wheel-drive car for the first time, the Peugeot 205 Turbo 16 driven by Ari Vatanen: The writing was on the wall. Encouragingly, the Sport Quattro came good in the Ivory Coast, where it secured the year’s world drivers’ championship for Stig Blomqvist.
In 1985, Audi continued to campaign the first evolution Sport Quattro, but, like the opposition, they were readying their second evo Group B monster. Even so, the team still found time to refine their ’85 car with better suspension and a six-speed gearbox. Meanwhile, the second coming of the Sport Quattro called the E2, which was radical to say the least, was scheduled to appear in Argentina.
It would be wrong to summarize the 1985 season by declaring, “The king is dead. Long live the king!” just because the year was a Peugeot walkover. The French team would beat Audi to the world manufacturers’ championship and their Finnish driver Timo Salonen was to take the drivers’ title away from Stig Blomqvist. But Audi’s Seventh Cavalry was to be the second evolution of the Sport Quattro and that was expected to give Peugeot and all the other late four-wheel-drive converts a run for their money.
Sure enough, the Audi Sport Quattro E2 made its first appearance on schedule in the Rally of Argentina and it caused a sensation, because it introduced wings to world championship rallying. The car, driven by Stig Blomqvist, only lasted eight stages before retiring with engine trouble, but the Swede said he felt the effect of the car’s downforce, especially when bits of the wing broke off!
Audi’s winged wonder had a 52/48 weight distribution instead of the E1’s 58/42. That was mainly because the oil, transmission and water radiators were moved back to the trunk: They needed substantial cooling, so Audi crafted an enormous rear wing to do the job and gave the front end a huge, fared air dam. The car demanded more downforce than its predecessor, so that its effective weight went up from 1,000 kg to 1,500 kg at high speed. The oodles of power from the E2’s new 444-hp engine with Bosch Jetronic injection and a KKK turbo would take care of any increased drag. After a long, hard struggle with the fragile Audi Sport Quattro, the team’s drivers felt they could really get somewhere with the E2, which was much more stable and, unlike the Sport Quattro, did not try every which way to fly off the stage. Mikkola’s E2 lost its oil and stopped on the 1985 1,000 Lakes, but Stig brought his winged Audi home in 2nd place. It was a case of too little too late, though: The game was over for another year. The first company to go world championship rallying with a four-wheel-drive car had been beaten to the world titles by the first team to follow in its footsteps. It was Peugeot’s big day, because the dynamic French team won not only the Finnish rally, but also the manufacturers’ world championship with 142 points to Audi’s 108, and Timo Salonen deposed Stig Blomqvist as world champion driver with his 124 points to the Swede’s 74.
The fact remains that the Audi Sport Quattro E2 was coming good and that was confirmed by Walter Rohrl taking it to its maiden victory in the 1985 Sanremo Rally. Although the E2 still could not match the second evolution Peugeot on asphalt, Rohrl won every loose-surfaced special but one, leading the rally over 43 of its 45 timed sections.
By early 1986 all the main contenders had developed four-wheel-drive cars, many with an abundance of aerodynamic devices, with which to compete in the new Group B. The pioneers were Audi, of course, but now the Lancia Delta S4, Citroën BX4TC, MG Metro, Mazda Familia, as well as reigning world champions Peugeot all had four driven wheels. It was the year of the supercars, 1986: The monsters that would kill people and put the fear of God in many who watched and rallied them for their unbridled power and danger on the sport’s narrow spectator-packed stages.
The Lancia S4 won the 1986 Monte Carlo Rally and the Peugeot the Swedish, but poor spectator control spelled disaster for the Group B cars in Portugal. Local man Joachim Santos lost control of his Ford RS200 and it ploughed into the crowd, killing three spectators and injuring dozens more. But the organizers still did not stop the stage and that unnerved the remaining drivers: some just cruised through without making any attempt at a time and others, unaware of the disaster, were literally attacked by angry spectators as they passed the scene of so much carnage.
The drivers returned to rally headquarters, held a press conference and virtually went on strike. They said they had decided not to continue with the event, as they believed the organizers were unable to control the crowds and that, they believed, was a recipe for an even greater disaster—if that were possible. Audi immediately withdrew their works team from Group B rallying and stayed out for the rest of the season. And, after the deaths of Lancia’s Henri Toivonen and Silvio Cresto on the Tour de Corse a few months later, FISA rushed in some new regulations and then outlawed Group B cars altogether. The sport would return to Group A only the following season.
Audi duly developed the Group A 200 Quattro for 1987. Walter Rohrl came 3rd in the car on the year’s Monte Carlo Rally, and Hannu Mikkola even won the Safari in it, with Rohrl 2nd. But Audi never won another world championship rally after that, although their cars were still taking podium places well into 1992.
In the five years between 1982 and 1987, though, Audi showed a disbelieving rally world that the way to go was four-wheel drive. They were the pioneers; they blazed the trail that everyone else would follow. During that time, the Quattros in their various forms won 4 world rally championships and 24 world championship rallies, including the Swedish four times, the Portugal, Sanremo and RAC three times each, the Argentinean and 1,000 Lakes twice apiece. And that, certainly, is no laughing matter—unless you are Audi!
